Isaiah chapter 61, and reading
from verse one. The Spirit of the Lord God is
upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings
unto the meek. He hath sent me to bind up the
brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening
of the prison to them that are bound. to proclaim the acceptable
year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort
all that mourn, to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give
unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the
garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might
be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that
he might be glorified. Amen. May God bless that reading. And then just turn with me, if
you will, to Matthew chapter five. Matthew chapter five. Matthew chapter five, and we'll
read from, or we will read verse four. Matthew five, verse four. Blessed are they that mourn,
for they shall be comforted. Again, blessed are they that
mourn, for they shall be comforted. And I want to think for a little
while this evening of what it means to mourn. What it means to mourn. The Lord Jesus Christ spent time
at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. And when he was there, he wept
at that graveside. He wept at the graveside. And
he taught us, I think, in doing so, that the Lord himself knew
what it was to grieve in his human spirit. And that's really
quite a profound thing. We read in Hebrews that he is
touched with the feeling of our infirmities. Now I'm gonna come
back to that in a little while because I think that in itself
is a pretty amazing statement, the feeling of our infirmities.
But I want first of all to mention this fact that the Lord Jesus
Christ in weeping at Lazarus's tomb and the disciples and those
who were gathered there observing this and the Holy Spirit recording
it for us in scripture is intentional. It's there for a reason and the
reason is our comfort. The reason is that we should
be comforted in remembering that the Lord Jesus Christ took upon
himself our humanity in its entirety and the Lord was a man like us. The Lord was a man without sin,
granted, but in his emotions, in his feelings, he was just
like us. And when his friend died, and
when he saw the grief in those people around there at that gravesite,
he joined with them. He had a fellowship with them
in their loss, in their mourning, in their bereavement, he was
able to join with them. And we ought to take comfort
from remembering that the Lord Jesus Christ so united himself
to our humanity. That's an amazing thing. For the Lord to have done so,
for the Lord to have come and taken our flesh, for God himself
to have so descended to this point of taking a human body
and entering in with all of the experiences that are part and
parcel of our humanity is a truly amazing thing. He felt grief
in his spirit there at Lazarus's tomb. And for all who suffer
loss in this world, and for all who know grief, and we will all
be there someday. We will all be there someday.
It's part and parcel of our life experience. We are encouraged
hereby to take our heart to the Lord Jesus. to take our grief
and our mourning to the Saviour, because He has hereby taught
us that He understands what we're going through. Not only does
He understand, but He sympathises, He empathises, He is able to
share with us in these things. We're not going to Him as some
standoffish, remote God or power or deity. but we're entering
in. We have a union and a communion. We have a depth of fellowship
in the profundity of the grief that we are enduring, the mourning
that we're experiencing, to be able to take it and share it
with the Lord Jesus. The Lord's reaction to his friend's
feelings ought to be an encouragement and a comfort to us because we
have a spiritual union with the Lord Jesus Christ in this natural
realm that is a comfort to our hearts. And our mourning and
our loss and our grief is the key that turns the lock of the
door that allows us to enter into that communion. The Lord
uses these experiences in order to deepen our relationship with
him. And so at this level, we can
say that the word of God is true. Blessed are those that mourn,
for they shall be comforted. And we have a comfort that we
are able to enter into in our mourning with the Lord Jesus
Christ. Mourning is both natural and
it is familiar to the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. I dare
say even, perhaps, the Lord's people, and this is a bit presumptuous,
but let me say it anyway. I dare say that perhaps the Lord's
people have a greater understanding about loss and death than other
people in the world. I think that part of the ploy
that Satan has in blinding the eyes of men and women is to take
away that fear of dying, to remove that sense of the awfulness of
an eternity without God, that there's almost, as it were, a
barrier, a wall placed that they don't see the terror of what
lies beyond the grave, what lies in death to those who have no
saviour. And therefore the church, in
a sense, is the proper place to get a perspective on death. Because only we, only the Lord's
people can truly grasp the significance of what it is to pass from this
time into eternity. And the Lord's people are not,
as the testimony of Scripture shows us, the Lord's people are
not immune from grief or from loss. Every generation has to
face its own realities. And sometimes, you know, we look
back in our history and we can see that there have been times
of great loss, times when everybody that we knew died. when disease
was so rampant and drugs were so scarce or not yet invented
that if a plague came to the town, it could wipe out the town,
90, 95% of the people die. or if there was a war or if there
was some tribal problem, if there was a great journey to be taken.
We live in a land where people have been very familiar with
loss and with grief and every generation has to face it. And this is where I think that
little phrase, the feeling of our infirmities, if we just think
about it for a moment and realise just how infirm we are, in every
aspect of our humanity. This head, this head, this mind
of mine, it gets so wound up. It gets so distracted. This is
an infirmity to me. And this body, this body takes
me places I don't want to go. These feet and these hands are
engaged in activities I would rather not be involved in. This heart finds passions where
it shouldn't. Everything about my physical
frame, my emotions, my mental abilities, my physical strength
is a vulnerability that is exploited in this evil world in order to
attack my spirit, my soul. And we're aware of these infirmities.
And these infirmities cause us challenges, the feelings of our
infirmities. The discouragements that come,
the fear that arises, the temptations that we encounter, the sin into
which we fall, the conscience that we have, all these things
are the feelings of our infirmities. And the Lord Jesus Christ, he
tells us that he's touched, not to suggest that the Lord in any
way was sinful, but he's touched with the feelings of our infirmities. He understands us. And like a
loving father who understands those opening pressures and issues
that are going on in the life of a young person who's maybe
just encountering them for the first time and thinks that the
world is collapsing around them, the father is able to succour,
able to lead through, able to help. And that is how the Lord
is able to help us too. I note when we look at scripture
how the Lord's people have dealt with the feeling of their infirmities
over the generations, and especially in the context of mourning and
of loss and grief. Sin in this world has reaped
a devastating, from that first moment when Eve and Adam following
her. Adam, he carries the responsibility. When Adam sinned and fell, that
death which came upon humanity has reaped a terrible price and
harvested everyone with so very few exceptions. We all have to
face loss and grief. We all see it around about us. And Abraham, we're told, grieved
for Sarah. And we read, Abraham came to
mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. So Abraham, the father of
promise, the one who had spoken face to face with God, the one
who had seen the evidence of God in so many ways, I was reading
about Abraham a little bit earlier and it said that God blessed
Abraham in all his ways. And even a people who are blessed
in all their ways, they yet have to come and grieve and weep for
their loss. And Abraham did for Sarah. Joseph
and his brothers grieved for Jacob, their father. They mourned
with a very great and sore lamentation." Jacob was an old man, and yet
they mourned with a great and very sore lamentation. And in the New Testament, we
learn that the church, the Lord's people, they mourned for Stephen. Stephen, we call him the first
martyr, the one who stood against those proud Pharisees, who stood
up in the midst of his accusers, the priests, and declared beautifully,
the wonderful gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, and they hated
him for it, and they, quote, gnashed on him with their teeth. That's just pejorative, isn't
it? That's just a figure of speech, oh? Really? Really? They bit him. They bit him. and he was taken
out and Saul of Tarsus held their coats as they stoned him to death. I take that to mean that Saul
was probably the instigator of the death of Stephen. And the church mourned Stephen
and Acts 8 verse 2 tells us this, and devout men carried Stephen
to his burial and made great lamentation over him. These are
mourners. These are people who mourned.
The church mourned. Abraham mourned. Joseph mourned. And we have occasion to mourn
in this life. But here too, the church, I think,
has a blessing in their mourning. Because why did the Lord Jesus
Christ give us a special service to remember his death? Why did
the Lord give us a special service, a communion service? We call
it the Lord's Supper. He said, this do ye in remembrance
of me. He said, as oft as you do this,
you show forth my death. You see, the church is to be
preoccupied with death, the death of the Lord Jesus. And we have
frequently and regularly to go back to this foundational element
of our salvation, the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. The world,
I think, our modern society is endeavouring to the best of its
ability. It can only go so far, but to
the best of our ability to expunge the whole thought of death. It's
made pleasant, it's made hygienic, it's spoken of in a way that
it's just a choice that people make. There's no longer any stigma
attached even to deciding that we want to end our lives or we
want to have a death that's just easy and casual and a quick injection
and a pleasant going to sleep and we've got the right to do
that. There's no fear of death any longer but the church properly
understands death in that it has seen what it cost the Lord
Jesus Christ in order to deliver us from the sting of death. We are called at that point of
our greatest weakness, we are called at the point where we
have no strength, that place where we are defeated, we are
called to remember that the Lord Jesus Christ entered that place,
stood on that spot, and died for us in order to redeem us
from spiritual death. Our fear, and our fear of death,
the Saviour has dealt with. by moving into that place and
dying for us. We mourn, we mourn, but we are
taught to say by the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, this is
not the end. We grieve for our loss, but we
are taught to say there's something better beyond. And we understand
that in a way that the world cannot. And therein is comfort
for those who mourn. So once again, the scripture
is true. Blessed are they that mourn,
for they shall be comforted. However, however, While there
is for the church comfort in all our mourning, that's not
really what this verse is about. But what I couldn't do is approach
this verse about mourning without recognising the way in which
most of us understand that phrase in our practical lives. So having
dealt with that element of mourning, we look now at the spiritual
meaning that the Lord was directing our attention to when he gave
this word in that sermon that he delivered there on the mountain. Blessed are they that mourn,
for they shall be comforted. To mourn means to remember with
sorrow. That's the meaning of mourn,
to remember with sorrow. And here in this passage, it's
connected with verse three, where we're told, blessed are the poor
in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The poor in
spirit, we've thought about this before, are those that see and
understand their spiritual poverty and their need before the Holy
God. They understand that there is
nothing in themselves. They can't put their hands in
their pocket and pay their way out of their mess. They can't
come up with a good work which is going to ameliorate or pacify
God as far as their sin and wickedness is concerned. They know that.
They know that there is a poverty in them that must simply throw
themselves at the foot of God's throne and seek his mercy. There is a little phrase in the
book of Isaiah, which is, I think we read it actually, didn't we?
That was part of that reading. Yeah, it was in verse three of
chapter 61. Talks about those who mourn in Zion. Those who mourn in Zion. And
that's not a reference to those who encounter loss through bereavement. But it is a reference to the
fact that there is a people who have seen their sin. and who
lament over their spiritual condition. They lament because of their
spiritual poverty. They remember with sorrow the
kind of people that they are and they understand who they
are. They are they who remember their
sin, and they regret the things that they've done, they regret
the things that they've said, they regret the things that they
have thought. and they repent of it. And here we throw ourselves again
back into this sense of a people who feel the burden of their
natural state, their unworthiness before God. They feel the threat
of their own spiritual inabilities. They feel the vulnerability of
a people who have no hope in themselves and they have this
persistent, nagging doubt that they're ever going to be able
to do anything about it. They know that they are in need
before God. And this sorrow then, this mourning,
this remembering our condition. It speaks first of all of an
awakening that the Lord is pleased to give to those to whom he will
show grace and mercy. He rouses us He speaks to us. He stirs us up. He brings us
into circumstances, dire straits, if you like. He brings us into
a place where we feel caged, we feel bound up, and we begin
to sense something of our need before His glory. We call it
conviction. We call it conviction. And it's
a reproving of our sin. It stirs up our past sins. It reminds us of what we've done
and where we've been. It perhaps reminds us of the
consequences of those sins, the hurt that has been caused, the
loss that has been incurred, the shame that has been part
of that process. And these things all begin to
prey upon our heart and our mind, and our consciences are stirred
It causes us to see them more clearly, more clearly than we
ever did before. We thought it was a joke. We
thought it was fun. We thought it was a pleasure.
We thought that it was just what people did. But now that we don't
see it in those relative terms, we see it in absolute terms. We don't just see it as the way
that we passed our times or some of the foibles of youth, but
we see it as a crime against the holy God. And we are brought,
like the prodigal son, to say, I have sinned against heaven
and before thee. And we remember with sorrows
the offences that we have committed against God. That's what it is
to mourn for our sins. That's what it is to mourn. And
the only way that such mourning can be pacified, placated, eased,
comforted, is for us in our soul to have a glimpse of the blood
of the Lord Jesus Christ availing for us. Only in his shed blood,
only the blood that cleanses, only that precious effusion of
mercy that comes from a sacrificed saviour will ever help those
who mourn for their sins. Nothing else will do. Nothing
else will do. You can go to your good works. You can go to your religious
practices. You can go to your fellow worshippers. You can go to your priest or
your minister and you can get all of the back slapping, praising,
accomplishments, charitable works, lauded and lifted up and honoured. And it doesn't mean a thing. It will not. Do you know what? This is one of Satan's lies.
And I think very often people have to get through these processes
and realise just how empty all that back-slapping praise is. because the priest and the minister
will put you in your coffin and give you a great send-off, and you'll go to hell. So what
we have here is an understanding that it takes the blood of Christ
to cleanse our sin. And when we mourn for our sin,
It is with an understanding that only the Lord Jesus Christ's
substitutionary death and only what we call conversion will
make a difference to our soul. It has to be changed from the
inside. Nothing from the outside is going
to make a difference. And for that sense of sin to
be relieved, The Holy Spirit has to apply the sacrifice and
the blood of Christ to our conscience. Another thing that this shows
us here is this. Our sin doesn't finish when we're
converted. It goes on. It goes on. It almost seems to have a life
of its own. And in truth it does, because
the old man is our flesh. The old man is that same creature
that existed prior to our conversion. A change has taken place. Where
once he sat upon the throne of our passions, now he's been dispossessed. The Lord Jesus Christ now sits
upon the throne of a believer's experience. But that doesn't
mean to say that the old man gives up without a fight. And
he snaps and he barks and he goes after us with all the strength
and energy and power that he possibly can. And we discover
something called indwelling sin. we discover the reality that
when we thought we had changed, when we thought we were different,
when we thought all things had become new, the reality is that
that old was still there. It's besetting sin. It's tempting. It wrestles and fights with us
against the new man, against the new nature. And the reality
is that the continuing presence of that sin, it surprises us. And it distresses us. And we're
unhappy about it. And we regret its presence. And we long that it were different. And we remember with sorrow those
things that we still commit before the Lord. We find sin now to
be distasteful. We find it to be repulsive. We
find it to be burdensome. We find it to be lurking at our
door all the time. We don't want it to be there,
but the reality is that there it stays. And we discover that
sin to be deceitful. It's like a chameleon. It hides. We think we're looking at something,
and when we look at it, suddenly it shifts shape. You know what
a shapeshifter is? That's a modern phrase from some
of the fantasy films that there are around shapeshifters. Maybe
some of the old classical writers thought about these things as
well. And that's what sin's like. Sin appears as something wholesome,
attractive, good for us. But it's like a chameleon. And
suddenly we see its true colors. And we realize that we've been
deceived. It creeps up on us. It seduces
us. It disguises and surprises. And when we discover that we
have fallen into temptation and we have sinned, yes, it causes
us grief, but we discover, like Paul, O wretched man that I am,
who will deliver me from this body of death? Nothing that we
do, nothing that we do is really separate from sin. It taints
and it touches and it disrupts and distracts from everything
that we do. I remember once hearing about
Spurgeon coming out of the pool pit one day and he just delivered
a really clear, perceptive, and striking sermon. And as he was
coming down out the steps, he was met by one of his deacons
who said, Mr. Spurgeon, that was a wonderful
sermon. And Spurgeon said to him, yes,
I know. The devil's already told me that. Everything that we do, nothing
that we do, There's nothing that we can bring
forth to the Lord that isn't tainted in some way with the
stench of sin. And that's why we need these
constant, fresh views of the Lord Jesus Christ. I dare say,
if we were to think about it, that's why we're here tonight.
Because you're probably not here for my social company. Nor are
you here for the tea and the biscuits because you can get
better tea and biscuits somewhere else. And you'll be more comfortable
in your own home. But you see, we come here tonight
and we gather on the Lord's Day and we worship together because
what we've discovered is that we need a fresh view of the blood
of Christ. We need to have that fellowship,
that comfort, that entering into these truths because week by
week we need to be refreshed. And we come to Him and we come
to His blood and we come to His sacrifice and we come to communion
and the blood. and the body of Christ, the bread
and the wine, in order to remind ourselves, in order to get rid
of the dross and to try and focus once again on the true important
things that he has taught us. We need deliverance from the
power of Satan. We need deliverance from the
dominion of sin, from the curse of the law, from all the evil
practices that are in this world and all the bombardment that
goes on in the world. in our relationships, in the
workplace, in the television and media, in the political sphere,
in every aspect of our lives, Satan is seeking to disguise
and surprise. And that's why we need to come
frequently and be renewed. The text says, and we're going
to wrap this up now, but there's a lovely point to be made about
this verse. Because it says, blessed are
they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. And what we've
been talking about here in the second part of our thoughts about
what it means to mourn is that these are burdens that we carry
and cause us to be sorrowful. But in the midst of our sorrow,
there's a promise for the Lord's people, that they will be comforted. He doesn't say he's going to
take away the reason for our mourning, but he says that he
will comfort us when we mourn. This is a contradiction that
is hard to explain. How do you get happy people that
are sad or sad people that are happy? How do you get joyful
people that are sorrowing or sorrowing people that are joyful? And yet this is the contradiction
of the believer. This is the warfare. This is
the dilemma that we have, the old and the new. We are blessed
mourners. They shall be comforted. The
Lord does not leave us comfortless. He said that he was going away
and leaving his disciples, but he said, I will send you another,
a comforter. I will not leave you comfortless. And that's something that we
have to hold on to. Whatever this world throws at
us, the Lord is by our side and he has promised never to leave
us or forsake us. The Lord comes to his people. It's not the preacher that comes. It's not even the ministry that
comes. It's the Lord who comes to his
people. We come seeking the Lord. We
come into the presence of the Lord's people because he's told
us that he'll be there. So we're going with the prospect
of making an appointment with the Lord Jesus Christ, I will
not leave you comfortless. Do you remember when the Lord
stood up in the synagogue in Nazareth? He had grown up in
Nazareth and he had made it his practice to go to the synagogue
as a youth and as a man. And he came back to Nazareth.
And in Luke chapter four, we read these words. And he came
to Nazareth where he had been brought up. And as his custom
was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood
up for to read. And there was delivered unto
him, this is the Lord, the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when
he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed
me to preach the gospel to the poor. He hath sent me to heal
the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives. and recovering of sight to the
blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the
acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and he
gave it again to the minister, and sat down, and the eyes of
all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him." I guess
that's the proverbial, you could have heard a pin drop. What he was saying there was
that Isaiah prophesied this long ago. Now you're seeing it in
your very midst. And that's the portion that we
read together from Isaiah 61. That's where the Lord read that
day in the synagogue. He said, to proclaim the acceptable
year of the Lord, the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort
all that mourn. That was the Lord's work. He
came in order to bring salvation. He came in order to bring deliverance. He came in order to release the
captive who was bound up in sin. And he came in order to comfort
them that mourn. To appoint unto them that mourn
in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for
mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.
How are we comforted? These three graces, Isaiah tells
us, are the graces which the Lord Jesus Christ came to secure
and dispense to his people. Are you a mourner in Zion? Do you feel that sorrow for sin? The blessing is yours and the
comfort is yours. We're comforted because these
three graces are freely bestowed by the Lord. He has given us
beauty for ashes. Beauty for ashes. We don't feel
beautiful. We often feel quite the opposite
of beautiful. But when the Lord God looks upon
us, he sees something beautiful. He sees a beautiful people, for
he has adorned us. He's washed us, and we're clean. He has adorned us with his righteousness. He has given us sweet-smelling
ointments. He has made our complexion beautiful,
and he has given us all that we require. a thickness to stand
in his presence, a robe of perfect righteousness. He has given us
beauty for the ashes that is the product of our dissolute
lives. He has given us oil of joy for
mourning. The Holy Spirit is often likened
to oil in Scripture, and that Holy Spirit indwells us, and
that's a comfort for the Lord's people too. Not only are we comforted
for the righteousness that we have, but we're comforted for
that indwelling presence of God the Holy Spirit, who ministers
to our spirit, who keeps us when we would wander off, who encourages
us when we become discouraged, who leads us into the truth when
we so often would be distracted by the lies around about us. And he gives us garments of praise. I like that. I like that. Garments
of praise. Because you know what we have
to offer the Lord God? Absolutely nothing except gratitude. All we can say is thank you.
Thank you for what you've done for me. And when we sing our
hymns, we're singing hymns of praise. We're thanking him, we're
rehearsing, we're going back over the story of the fact that
we're sinners saved by grace. And we draw our comfort from
nothing within ourselves, but all those things which he has
done. Garments of praise for the spirit
of heaviness. Hearts of gratitude. And we're
called, this is the final part, we're called, we're given these
three things and then we're given a name. We're called Trees of
Righteousness. The planting of the Lord. Trees of Righteousness. Did you
know that? The church is called Trees of
Righteousness. The Lord's people are trees of
righteousness. There's an interesting thing
about the word tree. The word tree and the word true,
tree and true, have the same origin. And that comes from the fact
that there was a time when If something was faithful, it was
a tree. A tree came every year. It came
every year. It gave its fruit every year. It put its roots down deep in
the ground. It struck up with a height and
reached for the sky. And the old man, and days long
before we can remember, he would stand under the tree in order
to pass judgments and the tree would be representative of something
that was true. And so the word true actually
has its origin in language from the word tree. We are trees of
righteousness. we resonate the truth of God
towards man. We're trees of righteousness.
We are planted by him. He has set us in this world. He has given us the blessings
of his grace and his mercy, and he causes us to be a glory to
him. Trees of righteousness, the planting
of the Lord, that he might be glorified. Yeah. What is it to
mourn? True, mourning is the experiences
that we feel for loss. And the Lord has shown us that
he is united with us in the mourning that we do. And the church has
always mourned like Abraham and Joseph and the believers when
they took away Stephen to bury him. And this is like mourning. But the mourning for sin is a
deeper reality of the people of God. But the Lord Jesus Christ
has promised that he will comfort us. And in the comfort that he
gives us, that glimpse of himself, the understanding of the efficacy
of his blood, the righteousness that he adorns us with, those
gifts and graces that he bestows upon us, he shows our true blessedness. So when we read, blessed are
the poor in spirit, And when we read, blessed are they that
mourn, we can see that though we are the most impoverished
of people, the most grieved and sorrowful in this world, for
the insights and understandings that we've been given of ourself,
yet in that very bankruptcy, the Lord is pleased to bestow
his kindness and his grace and his riches. We're a blessed people
and that's a good reason to thank him and praise his name. Amen.